


The Hidden Variable

by kitizl



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alien Planet, Between Series 9 and 10, Character Death, Dead Companions, Depressed Doctor, Deserted planet, Doctor Whump, Earth, Guilt, Isolation, Shadow Proclamation - Freeform, UNIT, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 02:06:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13560393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitizl/pseuds/kitizl
Summary: The Doctor has hidden in the darkest part of Universe where there can be no life, and no manner of communicating to the rest of the Universe -- basically nothing. The humans have just lost a war. They've lost trust in everything. But they have a chance to redeem themselves. It doesn't look pretty. Only when the Doctor realizes that he isn't as alone as he thought he was in his hiding space, will he understand that a bigger, subtler plot is taking over.





	1. REMOTE.

# REMOTE.

In the cold, quiet loneliness of space, there was an Earth-sized beige planet that nobody could have detected even if they were searching for it. It was the kind of planet that was impossible to find unless you already knew it existed.

It orbited a massive neutron star that was barely above the Chandrasekar limit. Someone could throw a piece of rock onto the neutron star that could disturb the entire equilibrium that the neutron-matter was holding delicately and turn it into a blackhole. And that wouldn’t make things very different on this planet.

Being so close to this rotation neutron star already caused the planet to be attacked by a shower of deadly ionizing radiation all the time. The planet was sterilized better than the surgical implements on the Galactic Infirmary – Oort Cloud. The proximity to the star also blanketed the entire planet in a spiral of magnetic fields that prevented any signal from ever getting out of the planet.

It was the darkest corner of the universe.

If you were able to stand on the surface of this planet, you could see the blue tongues from the plasma jets eject from the poles of the neutron star, from an otherwise colourless sky. There was no atmosphere, after all. But in the darkness of the cold Universe, out of nowhere, a blue box faded into view.

* * *

_Shadow Proclamation HQ, Section 433 – Milky Way_

The Seventy Ninth Judoon Squadron were being transported in a shuttle from Asteroid 432 to Asteroid 433 where the main building was situated. Among the Judoon was the youngest cadet who looked nervously outside the windows. He knew precisely why they were going to the main building.

They walked into the full-white room that was freezing cold. The squadron, which contained twenty soldiers, stood in single file all of them waiting for the Shadow Architect to talk. She was looking out the window, holding her hands behind her.

“Is everyone from the Seventy Ninth here?” she asked.

Every stomped their leg in unison.

“Good,” she said and turned around and seated herself. “Because I think we need to hold someone accountable, and I have been on this ever since the Event happened. Fifty days. That is way too long, don’t you think?”

Silence.

“Captain, do you know why the Seventy Ninth is being summoned?”

“No sir,” the Captain replied, aided by the translator in his helmet.

“What a pity. Your squadron has failed, Captain. Everyone in this squadron including you are being sentenced for neglect of duties and two of the soldiers for evidence tampering.”

Silence. This one seemed to be filled with fear.

“You do realize what this means, don’t you Captain?”

Everyone did.

Death.

* * *

_???, ??? – ???_

The TARDIS protested against entering the vicinity of the hidden planet. The Doctor struggled to get the TARDIS to respond.

He checked the monitor to find if something was wrong than what he already knew.

“There’s nothing wrong!” he yelled. “Why don’t you want to land?”

The TARDIS hummed angrily.

“I know we can’t send signals out once we’re in there. That’s the point!”

The TARDIS shuffled angrily and threw the Doctor off his stance.

“What is the matter with you?” he said, and pulled another lever on the console. “This is what I want. You – You just listen to what I say and do what I say.”

The TARDIS rumbled chaotically as it went closer and closer into the gravitational vicinity of the neutron star.

The console room shuddered, and the emergency cloister bells rang. The Doctor checked the monitor again. The exterior was being attacked by the plasma soup that the accretion disc was kicking out.

He steered the TARDIS through the vast flares of the neutron star, and was able to spot the planet on the monitor without additional help from the computer. He pulled another lever, and the TARDIS immediately oriented itself to the gravitational field of the planet, and not the neutron star and shot straight down.

CRASH.

The lights turned off. The Doctor struggled to get up. He found his vision foggy - the TARDIS was steaming from the inside. “God damn it.”

He clicked a couple of buttons on the console to generate the artificial vitality bubble around the planet so that he could hopefully survive without some kind of life support system.

The TARDIS turned on again, although the lights were a lot dimmer this time. The monitor confirmed that the bubble was created, and the Doctor walked towards the door.

“Count every second. From the time I leave, to the time I get back. Every single second.”

* * *

_Longyearbyen, Svalbard – Norway_

The UNIT team waited by the airport for the CSO to walk out after her plane had just landed. Kate Stewart appeared with thick woolen clothing, in her failed attempt to protect her against the Arctic cold.

“Chief,” the general saluted. “We’ve arranged transportation from the Longyearbyen Airport to our underground base to the south of Spitsbergen.”

“Don’t they have an airport there?” Kate asked.

“It’s an abandoned town,” the general said, as he gestured her into the jeep-tank hybrid vehicle. “Precisely why we chose that to be our base.”

“You say south, I hear _warm_.”

“I’m afraid, chief, you will find that is not the case.”

Kate sat inside the fairly comfortable but heavily padded interior of the jeep-tank hybrid and frowned at the general who was sitting right in front of her.

“The base is about 90 kilometers north of here. And due to the terrain and the terrible winter climate, the entire duration of this trip is estimated to be about seven hours long. Which means we should be there at around 2000 hours.”

“It’s morning?” Kate said, and then retracted her statement with a slow pause. “The land of the midnight sun.”

“Rather the reverse, as it is right now. That happens six months from now.”

The jeep-tank hybrid started, and was starting to move slowly.

“Are you stationed here permanently?” she asked.

“9 months out of 12, chief,” he replied. “I get to visit my family in Nottingham for Christmas.”

“That sounds lovely. I mean, I would prefer it if you had vacations during the summer so that you could take some kind of a break away from all the ice and cold.”

“I’m afraid that’s not entirely that ideal,” the general replied. “Summer is when the sun is always up. It makes the people who work here go crazy.”

He then leaned forward and whispered, “You should feel bad for them, not for me.”

“How so?”

“I work here for nine months a year. They work here for 28 months without a break.”

Kate’s face grew pale, and she leaned back without asking any further questions.

“Sorry,” the general said. “It’s a complaint I’ve had to listen to when I arrested the people who tried to burn the labs down.”

“Sounds pleasant.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“We’re here for a specific purpose, general. We shall deal with logistics and human resources once our current crisis is complete.”

“Definitely, chief. Although I might want to warn you – the workers will not take that statement likely.”

“I’m sure they’ll find greater displeasure in the fact that we just lost a war,” she paused, and looked out the window. “and that the Doctor has abandoned us all.”

* * *

_???, ??? – ???_

The door opened, and the Doctor stood out gingerly. He looked at the ground. It looked solid. It looked like a desert to the eyes. He placed one foot on the ground. It was solid. Like it was a rock.

He took another step outside. He was able to stand firmly. It wasn’t a desert.

“Of course,” he thought. “No atmosphere, no winds, no erosion. No sand.”

He looked up at the sky which was colourless, but was slowly turning purple-blue over time. The TARDIS’s artificial atmosphere was reacting to the heavily ionizing radiation that was turning the atmosphere into other chemicals too exotic to keep track of.

His eyes squinted as he saw over the horizon, and saw absolutely nothing. He turned around, walked around the TARDIS, but as far as his eye could see, there was nothing but beige flatness.

However, as he kept squinting at the end of the horizon, he noticed that there was a small storm kicking up. That didn’t make any sense.

He fetched a monocle from the inside pocket of his suit and looked into it, and magnified the image by a hundred times.

It was a storm. A proper, rotating, cyclonic storm.

“New atmosphere,” he muttered. “And the first thing you make is a storm.”

He pocketed the monocle and walked away from the TARDIS as he continued muttering, “Thank you, but I have another party to crash.”

There was no party, of course. He chose this planet on purpose. He chose to neglect his TARDIS on purpose.

He chose to abandon the humans on purpose.

All he wanted, was to be alone for a moment. Or years. Whenever he felt like wanting the company of other organisms, he’d make his way back.

But not now. Not after what happened.

As he continued walking, his brain clicked like clockwork about how the storm was formed. There had to be non-uniform heating of the planet, which seems weird, because this planet was…

”…tidally locked. Oh no.”

He continued walking by, further into the never ending flatland. Was this penance? Was this absolution of sins that he believed he had committed?

He had no idea.

But he just wanted some peace.

Some quiet.

Some place where he didn’t have to meet anything that was a result of societies.

He kept walking for hours and hours, keeping himself on that straight line. It might have even been days. He lost count. The star remained fixed more or less over the azimuth, but he noticed that after a long period of walking, it had changed.

He’d walked long enough, that he was starting to move away from the star now. Physically.

As proof, in the distance, he could see a gradient of brightness. The bright beige slowly gave way from a darker brown that kept going until…

“What’s that?” he thought. He pulled out his monocle again and looked through.

A home? A shack? What was this?

He started running towards the cooler, darker region that was at a right angle with the neutron star, approaching this small dot that grew larger and larger until he was able to make out its features with his naked eye.

He started panting. He pulled out his monocle to check. He thought this planet was abandoned. That this planet was empty.

He looked at the shack through the monocles and he could see three letters printed in bright green over the front of the shack, which was pointed sixty degrees away from him.

It was a bar.


	2. FOUND.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate Stewart meets the UNIT team at Spitsbergen, the Doctor investigates the bar.

# FOUND.

_UNIT HQ, Spitsbergen, Svalbard – Norway_

The elevator shaft descended slowly from the frigid exterior, as Kate Stewart walked out of the elevator still heavily clad in winter clothes. She could still see her breath in front of her, and this annoyed her.

“I get that we are a secret base, but no central heating system?” she muttered to herself. Some of her colleagues were standing at the very end of the room and were waiting for her. She walked swiftly towards them.

“Ah, chief. I trust your trip here was pleasant” an old man said.

“Quite the contrary,” Kate replied. “I knew Svalbard was cold, but sitting in a tank for nine hours while you were in that cold is a whole other experience.”

“I promise you will get used to the cold,” the old man jokingly replied. “In fact the moment you get back to the mainland – possibly London – you’re going to be that person who always complains that it is warm.”

“It would be funnier if you went back to London during winter and said that,” said the woman standing right next to him, who looked slightly older than Kate herself.

“Dr Jackson,” the old man stretched his hand and Kate shook it. “And this is my assistant Dr Benett.”

“Stewart,” Kate replied. “Listen, I get that bureaucracy is a huge part of how UNIT functions, but can we get to the briefing before the official order kicks in? I think Westminster is still recovering from the war.”

Jackson gestured into the concrete room with a single window, illuminated by strikingly powerful fluorescent lamps.

“No word from the United Nations also,” Jackson said. “The United States is being suspiciously quiet about it, and our intelligence agencies have come up with nothing of substance so far.”

“What about the European Union?”

“Germany is re-establishing some laws after the… destruction of Lichtenstein, and is probably feverishly writing a report to sue the United Kingdom in the International Court of Justice.”

“This is a bigger shitshow than I thought,” Kate said.

“There are other things, but I think the reason why the United Kingdom has to remain mum for the time being is the reason why you are here,” Jackson paused. “The Doctor.”

“Ah, yes,” Kate said, opening her laptop. “The TARDIS was last sighted close to the Asteroid Belt, and we’ve found traces of chronons around the Martian region, so that confirms that evidence. As far as the evidence is concerned, it seems like he disappeared approximately 2 hours after the human base camp on Europa was destroyed.”

Dr Jackson listened pensively and didn’t interrupt Kate as she went along describing the final act of the war and that concluded with the absolute destruction of the base on Europa, the Europan Army conducting an air-strike against Earth which resulted in the destruction of several countries, and their eventual disappearance. He was an old man, his hair all white and his hairline well receded. His body still resembled that of a forty year old, however, and was physically nearly as fit as well.

His assistant did not share his patience, and after fifteen minutes of briefing, she spoke up, “What about the companion?”

“Who are you referring to?” Jackson asked her.

“His current one.”

“You make his companions sound like his wives,” Kate said.

“Close enough,” Benett said. “Doesn’t matter. We track the companion, we track the Doctor, right?”

“That trick used to work, but ever since Clara Oswald that has been nothing but a failed act. Using the companion to track down the Doctor is a sure-fire way of the Doctor losing his trust in us–”

“And in the end, he was the one who betrayed us.”

Kate sealed her lips, and turned away from the window to the concrete wall. She didn’t like it. The Earth in this situation. Weak, destroyed, paranoid, but most importantly, antagonizing the Doctor.

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

He couldn’t believe it. The very edge of the Universe, shrouded in darkness, and he was still not alone.

“Well,” he thought. “I suppose I should have expected that. There was no way of confirming that nothing existed on this planet.”

He advanced the bar slowly, one hand inside his coat to whip out his sonic shades any moment now. For some reason, he half-expected the bar to turn into a large robot that was going to attack him.

He stood in front of the bar sign and placed one foot on the wooden floor. The floor creaked. But judging by the sound of the creak the Doctor inferred that this was not real wood.

He entered the door which seemed to be stylized after the bars in Spaghetti Westerns. And he found a bartender. A female bartender, wearing a cowboy hat, a shirt tied around her waist and particularly provocative shorts. She was simply leaning over the bar, and her head turned to the Doctor once he stepped in.

“Welcome,” she said. “You seem to be our first customer.”

“Well that’s a relief,” he replied.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Not before you explain what’s going around here.”

“Look around,” she said, gesturing to the rest of the bar. “It’s a bar.”

“Yes, I got that.”

“So, do you want a drink?”

The Doctor pulled out his shades and focused on her. His mouth gaped open. “Of course,” he muttered.

“Alrighty,” she replied. “What would you like?”

“No, I didn’t mean of course to your question,” he mumbled. “You’re an android.”

She looked at him and raised her eyebrow. “Duh?”

* * *

_UNIT HQ, Spitsbergen, Svalbard – Norway_

The porter stopped in front of her room, and handed the fat iron keycard to her. “Please let me know if you need anything,” he said, before scooted off into the dimly lit corridor of the residential quarters.

Kate slid the fat keycard into the lock and it turned automatically, projecting a small pad where she placed her thumb. It displayed _Fingerprint Recognized_ and the heavy steel door slid open, revealing in the inside of her room.

The room was comfortably small. There was a small couch that doubled as a bed, a small bathroom stall and a single slab that probably was supposed to be used a kitchen, even though everyone could and probably should use the canteen. There were surveillance strips on the ceiling.

She pulled the lever that converted the couch to a bed. She placed her luggage on the bed, and looked around. The grey walls felt dull. She was almost thankful that she might have to spend very little time here.

She sat on the chair and let out a sigh of exhaustion. Her eyelids felt a bit heavy as they began to close–

The contact alert rang, and she picked up the telephone in the room.

“We’ve got intel from the Murmansk Station. How fast do you think you can get to the control center?”

Kate looked at the clock and her unpacked luggage.

“How important is this?”

“We’ve discovered the Shadow Proclamation,”

Kate’s eyes widened and she stood up. “I’m on my way. Fifteen minutes, tops.”

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The Doctor sat on the swiveling bar stool slowly, looking keenly into the eyes of the android.

“Does your slow advance mean you’re not going to drink?” the android asked.

“No, no drink,” he said, his eyes fixated on the android’s eyes. His eyes then roamed to her skin, immediately following which he pulled his sonic screwdriver out and examined the skin. “Organic. You’re meant to replicate a human to the tiniest detail.”

“Except, if I was human, I couldn’t have survived on this planet, could I?”

“So you know about this planet?”

“I know everything about it. I have it weirdly stored under _trivia_ , but I guess that’s what happens when you feed data to a perpetually learning CPU.”

“That’s not what I’m interested in. If your skin was organic, then there is no way on hell it had survived the lack of an atmosphere on this planet, not to mention the hourly cascade of ionizing radiation.”

“Of course. I’m technically only seven days old.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My sensors indicate that a spaceship landed on this planet about seven days ago. It’s attached to the firmware that kind of controls this entire bar. Once organic life was detected, the entire system started and I was technically arranged. Well, the chassis was arranged. The ‘me’ as in the CPU, was in hibernation until I was activated. CPU was activated. You know what I’m saying.”

“I see,” he said as he stood up and looked around the bar, whizzing his screwdriver around. “The bar was to be installed once humans managed to colonize this planet. You’re the welcoming party.”

He looked out the window and into the horizon. He couldn’t find anything. The sun seemed to more or less hang in the same place on the sky. This planet really was tidally locked.

“You couldn’t have used organic life as a trigger, it had to be something else. Your skin is organic, and I’m pretty sure there were some microbes that got onto the spacecraft before it landed here.”

“I’m pretty sure this entire planet sterilized everything.”

“Then how did you know that it was the right time to activate?”

“The atmosphere.”

“Of course,” the Doctor spun around. “If the colonists had managed to induce an artificial atmosphere then that is when it truly meant this planet was safe to inhabit. Your masters have really grown since the last time I saw them try to colonize a planet.”

“What happened?”

“Sent packs of robots to prepare an entire world - farming, building you name it. They did it without even considering the _human touch_ and they had practically become their own species.”

“Robots becoming species?”

“They were scary, trust me.”

“That’s how you determine whether an entity is a species or not? If they scare you?”

“Most of the time, that’s how it works, yes.”

“What about me?”

“Why should I be scared about you?”

The android bartender leaned over the bar and hoisted herself on top of it, now sitting on the bar. “Like I said, this,” she said, gesturing to the body, “is just the shell. The brain is tracking everything that happened on this planet. Including how the atmosphere was created.”

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “You know what, maybe the humans aren’t so smart. This level of sentience for a preparatory robot is alarming.”

Then he paused and really processed what she said. “What do you mean how the atmosphere was created?”

“The source. It took quite the computational power, I can tell you that.”

The Doctor didn’t say a word. The android bartender only smiled and whispered, “I know who you are.”

“I cross-checked it. It’s on my database. Two hearts, residual time energy, and a sonic probe,” the android said, stepping over the bar. “You’re the Doctor.”

* * *


	3. STAND.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate finds something from the Murmansk team. The Doctor further investigates the planet. Also, we get a peek into the main reason why he's here -- Amanda.

# STAND.

_UNIT HQ, Svalbard – Norway_

Kate stood in the cylindrical stainless steel cabin of the elevator, humming slowly to reach the lowest floor in the underground base - the conference hall.

She’d gotten used to the temperature after all these hours of exposure to the mildly inconvenient cold. She still had to wear her jackets with goose feathers, but it was certainly more tolerable. The cold in Svalbard was distinct from any other cold she’d experienced before in the fact that the cold in Svalbard seemed to directly strike the bone, completely avoiding the skin and flesh. Almost like X-Rays.

While her thoughts wound around the idea of XRays transmitting cold temperatures, the elevator pinged and the door slid open. She walked to the elliptical conference table, and took her seat next to the latus rectum of the ellipse. Sitting right next to her was Dr Benett, and Dr Jackson. Place right across the major axis of the ellipse was a large flatscreen TV, perfectly mirroring the table and showing their counterparts in Murmansk.

“Thank you for joining us, Chief Stewart,” the man on the other side of the television said.

“What’s the emergency?” Kate replied impatiently, as weak, dull pain slowly crept across her chest. It was dread.

The man looked to his colleagues, who were also male. “I am Colonel Poppins, this is Colonel Atkinson and Colonel Williams. We’ve received intel from the outposts of the asteroid belt, and we were seemingly the only station that were free to receive the communication signals.”

“The outpost from the asteroid belt? Are we talking about Ceres?” Dr Jackson asked.

“No, 4 Vesta. Ceres’s exasolar probe is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and so they could not catch this.”

“Exasolar?” Kate asked. “We’re talking about something that is outside the solar system?”

Colonel Poppins paused, nodded and opened a book that was right under him. As he was flipping the pages, “Under the heading of Galactic Organizations in the UNIT Glossary of Interstellar Terminology, an organization of the name of the Shadow Proclamation is listed. Based on the information from the Doctor, they are, to put simply, the space police.”

“Yes, we’ve dealt with the Shadow Proclamation before,” Kate paused as she saw Poppins raise an eyebrow. “Sort of,” she concluded. “What’s the point? Did the outpost have to engage with them, or were the probes deactivated by the Judoon?”

Kate realized that her speech was starting to slur a little bit. She also spoke too fast. She really was in a hurry. She was sweating. She checked her pulse on her wrist, and realized that it was pulsating – hard. Dread never felt this painful. The pain kept crawling across her chest, but slowly increasing in intensity.

“I believe, we have the coordinates of the location of the Shadow Proclamation.”

The eyes in the room immediately looked up and glowed. “No way,” Dr Benett said.

“Who else knows about this?” Dr Jackson asked.

“In accordance to protocol _Vitality_ , we have informed the secretary of UNIT firsthand. We were then ordered to share this information with the team searching for the Doctor.”

Dr Jackson looked uneasy. “If the secretary knows then she’s probably ordered for an attack on the headquarters. This is our only chance to regain some hope after losing a war, thanks to the Judoon.”

“I don’t understand, what’s the big problem?” Dr Benett asked.

“It’s an actual attack. Where there’s an attack, especially after what had happened, the odds of us ever finding the Doctor is slimmer than ever.”

“What _has_ the secretary ordered?” Kate asked.

“The standby regiment at 4 Vesta is currently arming themselves to launch an attack on the headquarters. They are projected to leave the Asteroid Belt in about two hundred hours.”

Those words shook Kate. Somehow the chest pain aggravated more now. Her eyes started blacking out. Wait a minute. People don’t black out because of anxiety.

This wasn’t anxiety. This was… oh no.

Kate clutched her chest and yelled, “Get me a stretcher! I’m having a heart attack!”

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The winds set in slowly, thanks to the uneven heating of the newly formed atmosphere. The Doctor walked outside, and stuck his tongue out. “I haven’t tasted wind like this before”, he looked at the neutron star. “Ah, ionizing radiation.”

“Doctor, why did you leave?” the bar-droid followed him out. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Well yeah, you spooked me like that. What did you think, I’d be impressed?”

“That’s probably what my programmers thought.”

“Well guess what, I’m not. It’s not cool. It’s not a party trick. Register that in your feedback memory somewhere.”

“Of course.”

The Doctor continued marching through the flat planet thinking he could get back to his TARDIS. Probably this wasn’t a very good plan. If the most alone he could get needs to happen in company with an android, he’d rather be inside the TARDIS.

“Where are we going?” the droid asked.

“Are you still following me?”

“You’re the first contact. I can’t let you go.”

“Are you holding me hostage then?”

“No, I’m just following you. I have no other guidance from my programming.”

“Brilliant,” the Doctor mumbled as he marched on. “A clingy robot. Who thought that was a good idea.”

“I can hear you…”

“I don’t really care… what’s your name?”

The droid paused for a moment and looked to the side, the clockwork whirring, searching for anything that resembles a label in her database.

“I have no name.”

“You were going to be a bartender and you don’t have a name?”

The droid shrugged.

The Doctor smiled. “That shrug – I haven’t seen a better humanoid robot. You’re almost… sentient.”

“My data bank is de-localized. I assure you, I’m created to make sure nobody tries to run a Turing test on me.”

“Except for this immense sense of self awareness. Why a robot would need self awareness, I have no idea. Especially one that is created to make sure nobody tries to run a Turing test on.”

“No arguments from here, Doctor.”

“Alright, if you’re going to follow me around, I need to call you something.”

“I see…?”

“I’m going to call you… Senti.”

The cloud-based clockwork whirred again. “Senti, definition : Currency of archaic country Estonia in pre-FTL age human race’s origin planet Earth, before switching to the Euro to participate in the European Union.”

The Doctor chuckled. They got to the TARDIS. He opened the door, and allowed Senti to get in first, the gentleman he was. There was a moment of hesitation in his action. The bad memories flooded him like a broken check dam. He snapped out of it. Good, Senti didn’t notice. He closed the door behind him.

“If you’re a robot, does that mean you have to answer all my questions?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” Senti said, sitting on one of the chairs.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. For two reasons. One, all human-created robots are designed to never disobey an order - in this case, a question. Two, “How come you aren’t surprised by the difference in space inside the TARDIS?”

“Hm?” she turned around.

“Every newcomer is shocked when they enter the TARDIS. They go _oh my GOD, it’s bigger on the INSIDE!_.”

“I guess I’m not a newcomer.”

“You’ve been in my timeline before?”

“No, not really. But I have a really detailed report of the TARDIS in my data bank.”

The Doctor pulled a stop that activated the TARDIS from indefinite hibernation. The monitor glimmered on. He looked at Senti and asked, “Species of Origin?”

Senti spaced out for a moment. A longer moment than usual. This wasn’t just the clockwork spinning. Something else. She replied, “I have no data regarding that.”

The Doctor could only frown. A disobedient robot. This could end badly.

He clicked a couple of buttons, accessing the TARDIS’s data bank. When suddenly, there was a loud thud, and everything went red and dark.

“No, no, no,” the Doctor said, repeatedly hammering the keyboard with his fingers. He ran to the other end of the console, and pulled the stop again. Nothing changed. “Speak to me, what’s going on?”

No response.

“Something is very, very fishy over here,” he mused. The monitor was somewhat active. It was able to give a local information map on the planet. But nothing more.

“Something’s jamming the TARDIS from operating,” the Doctor turned to Senti. “Is there any other infrastructure on this planet?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

The Doctor turned back to the monitor and manually looked at every single survey grid on the planet. And he spotted something. He pulled the monitor to Senti and pointed it at her.

“What is this?”

Senti squinted her eyes, changing the aperture of her incredibly flexible nano-tube eye-lens. She shook her head. “I have no idea what this is. There is no information in my data bank.”

He stood back exasperated. There were no life signs on the planet. He made sure of that. Yet, he first finds a borderline sentient droid, and now, a tower that seems to be transmitting a jamming signal.

Nothing was going right. Everything was going wrong. And the Doctor didn’t like it one bit.

* * *

_Hospital, UNIT HQ, Svalbard – Norway_

When Kate woke up, she was already in the hospital. She managed to turn her head just enough to see the sign on the door. She couldn’t. The glass was frosted. She assumed that this meant she was in intensive care.

She pressed a button to the side of her bed, which presumably calls a nurse. A young man runs towards her, “You’re awake chief.”

“Heart attack?” she whispered.

“I’m afraid so. For an eighty year old woman, it’s amazing how you haven’t had one yet.”

“First time for everything,” she managed to chuckle back, except it hurt.

“The doctors said that you had two stressors. First was the weather, which can be pretty brutal at times. Second, was probably some anxiety inducing news. Perhaps even both.”

“Perhaps, yes.”

“I was actually told to inform you of this once you came to. The intensive care here is very limited, mostly maintained for any disasters that happens during the underground Hydrogen mining. But we aren’t entirely prepared for cardiac arrests, especially for women of your age.”

Kate didn’t like where this was going. “So?”

“The lead doctor has determined to send you to the hospital in the London Headquarters of UNIT. Speak of the devil, here she is,” he said turning back to the middle aged doctor walking towards her. “I’ll take it from here, Jorge,” she said. “How are you feeling Chief?”

Kate’s mind was racing. “How long has it been since I passed out?”

“Three, four hours at most.”

“Has there been any updates since? Any memos?”

“Well,” the doctor said and sat right by Kate’s legs. “I’m telling you as your doctor, but I’ve withheld all forms of duties for now. You need to get your mind and body back to normal before you go about saving the world.”

Kate mumbled angrily. She gripped the doctor’s hands and stood up, pulling her IV stand along with her. The pain ripped through her flesh. It didn’t matter. “Listen to me. You go and tell Dr. Jackson and Dr. Benett one very important thing.”

“I’m listening.”

“If they find the Doctor,” she whispered, the pain finally getting to her head. “Tell them to stand down. Stand down and wait for my orders. Is that clear?”

The doctor nodded, feeling unsure.

“Am I clear?”

The nod was a lot surer this time.

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The Doctor put away the beeping device that tracked the location of the tower. It was a very large tower. It could easily be missed unless you were directly in the visible eye-line. And with the spontaneously changing climatic conditions of the planet, the fog definitely didn’t help.

At the very tip of the tower was a light that alternated between red and violet. The Doctor looked to his left, and asked Senti, “Do you know what this is?”

“A transmitter?”

“It’s jamming the TARDIS from functioning. Does it look familiar?”

“Not really, no.”

The Doctor walked further until he found himself in the middle of the tower. There was a large, perfectly cubic box that could have been green or grey. It was difficult to tell in the fog. He opened it with the sonic screwdriver and found nothing but a couple of ports. He tried to use a sonic again, but nothing really budged. He looked at Senti and asked, “I suppose you don’t have some kind of peripheral to connect to external ports, do you?”

“Of course,” she said, pulling out a small cable from the back of her waist. It looked like a tail. “I am supposed to get regular weekly updates from this.”

“See if you connect to this,” he said, giving way for Senti to look at the various ports. She examined them closely, and let out an, “Ah,” when she found the port that fit her pin. She plugged it in, and the lights above the port started glowing.

“Do you recognize it?”

“I am completely unfamiliar with this interface,” Senti replied after a long pause. “I’m unfamiliar with the programming. The data bank is coming up empty.”

“Do you have access to some kind of control section?”

“It’s password locked.”

“Hold on,” he said, and pointed the sonic right at her temple. A silent hum rose to a mildly dull hum. “Now you should be able to do that.”

“You’re giving a sentient android the power to unlock systems?” she said, as the panel unlocked itself and revealed a smaller cube that was connected to the wires that powered the entire tower. “That’s a bad idea.”

“I don’t have another choice except to walk all the way back to the TARDIS. How long has it been anyway?” he said as he pulled the wires off and picked the box up. It had some distinct markings in it, but he couldn’t recognize them easily.

“If there was one thing I was programmed to do,” Senti said, disconnecting from the control panel. “Is to make sure my users don’t know how long it has been.”

Back in the TARDIS, Senti was sitting on the couch, feeling mildly uncomfortable for reasons unknown. The Doctor plugged the transmitter box to the TARDIS mainframe, and was access its contents through the main computer on the main console.

The TARDIS was analyzing the nature of the box. The Doctor sighed and stepped back. He looked at Senti, and raised an eyebrow. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

The Doctor sighed. Another female companion. Although she’s a robot this time. No feelings. No emotions. No life.

But that’s not what the expression on her face said. She could feel something. Perhaps organic beings called it pain.

It didn’t matter. The twisted look on her face reminded the Doctor too much about…

Amanda…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter felt a bit scattered. Although I think this chapter was slightly necessary to kick off the conflict required to really push the plot through.
> 
> Anyhoo, comments would be much appreciated!


	4. SEEK.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate is transported to London - with some issues. The Doctor finds the source of the transmitter, and is flushed with the memories and thoughts of what had happened right before this adventure began. The Shadow Proclamation take their next step - which might as well be the last.

# SEEK.

_Longyearsben, Svalbard – Norway_

The sky was turning grey. The equinox was approaching. On the open Longyearsben Airport, an ambulance marked in bright red, yellow and blue dashed into the runway and stopped close to a Boeing 747. The rear doors of the ambulance opened up, and two nurses jumped out, helping pull the bed out. Kate’s head came out first, and she immediately commented, “It’s getting darker, isn’t it?”

“It’s the seasons ma’am,” a nurse nervously commented.

Kate soon found out that she was entering a 747, when the trailer went right under one of the ginormous engines under the wings. Dr Jackson followed the bed quickly, and caught up with her. “You’ll be transported to London now. You’ll be accompanied by these nurses. Any questions?”

“Why a 747?”

“Dangerous people know that private jets carry someone important, so why not a 747, eh?”

Kate chuckled. It burned her lungs. She winced immediately. “Is that a metaphor for how disposable I am to UNIT?”

“Haven’t lost your sense of humour, I see.”

Kate smiled, but somewhere deep inside, she knew she wasn’t joking.

The inclined escalator mechanism elevated her to the lower first class cabin, where she was accompanied by the two nurses who carried her in, and some additional crew members. The pilots were presumably in the cockpit, which was located directly above the first class cabin, the cabin literally being the nose of the entire plane.

The nurses harnessed the bed to the wall by using multiple fixed points. A hostess walked over and asked, “Would you like something to drink?”

“Am I even allowed to drink something?” Kate replied.

The hostess’s face became pale for a moment. She looked wordlessly at the nurses. One of them offered, “I’ll take a look at your menu, and I’ll help choose which one might be the least dangerous. Sounds good?”

Kate nodded, although she didn’t feel all that thirsty, and she doubted if she would be thirsty for this entire trip.

Nevertheless, the nurse accompanied the hostess out of the cabin, while the one remaining nurse cross checked every single harness. “Everything looks fine. I’ll go check some things with the crew members ma’am.”

For the next twenty minutes, Kate did not think much about what was going on. There was a period of five minutes where the alarmingly loud sound of the wind breaking against the nose of the plane made it absolutely clear that the plane was taking off. But otherwise, her mind was more or less blank. She stared at the top of the ceiling of the cabin, which was decorated with dark blue swirls superposed on a yellow background. Weird. Those resembled the colours of Sweden more than that of Norway.

She would have kept spacing out for the entirety of that trip, but twenty minutes after the nurse left the cabin, she was forcefully snapped out of her mindspace when she heard a loud thud. It didn’t sound like a bird struck the plane, nor did it sound like an engine failing. It sounded like someone jumped on the outside of the plane.

She removed the IV from her wrist, and managed to remove some of the harnesses over her with considerable effort. She looked around. There was no one to be seen. She pulled the rest of the harnesses off, and she stood on the floor, wearing nothing but her hospital robe.

The intercom burst into static followed by the pilot saying, “Passengers of the plane, this is your captain speaking. Due to change in plans, we are heading towards Aberdeen instead of London.”

Kate raised her eyebrow. That made absolutely no sense. In addition to the nonsensical nature of the content, Kate was fairly sure that the pilot was possibly crying, or was even held at gunpoint.

Oh no.

Dull, yet violent metal thuds resounded from the ceiling. Kate fell to the floor, starting to panic. Her chest hurt once again. But not now. Not now.

She walked towards the safety cabin which she knew contained a shotgun. It was meant for emergency circumstances should the plane crash into the tundra wilderness above the arctic circle. Now, she was probably going to have to defend herself against hijackers.

The thuds seemed to come from her own floor now. They must have made it down from the cockpit. She cocked the shotgun, and aimed it against the sliding door. The door slid open, and the hijackers revealed themselves.

“Oh no,” she muttered, her aim against the unformed hijackers wavering briefly. The hijackers removed their helmets, and showed their head.

It was the Judoon.

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The monitor on the TARDIS displayed **COMPLETE** with a loud _ding_ from the console. The Doctor looked away from Senti and to the monitor. He typed a couple of commands into the keyboard. He didn’t care for most details, although he did archive them for further scientific purposes. A transmitter working in the gravitic conditions of this planet? Must be nice.

What he cared the most about was the source of the transmitter, and probably even the source of Senti. As the TARDIS pulled up the species of origins file and started decrypting it, the Doctor looked a little over his shoulder to see how Senti was doing. Fine, she was fine. Not she, it. It’s an it.

He looked straight forward as the white bold text was printed on the screen.

“That makes no sense,” the Doctor stepped back. “It’s hybrid.”

The Doctor walked around the console for a while, scratching his head, his hands twitching mid air. His brain worked furiously to make some sort of connection to the events that have transpired to the space police. Nothing came to mind.

“What do you mean hybrid?” Senti asked. “Multiple sources?”

The Doctor ran back to the monitor and scrolled through the list. “Yes, multiple sources, but there’s something else.”

He isolated the names of the civilizations and put them on a separate list. He pressed a black buzzer right next to the keyboard and immediately a long piece of paper with the width of a supermarket receipt came out. The Doctor grabbed it quickly and and zoomed across the list that contained over fifty different civilizations.

“These are armed civilizations,” the Doctor concluded, his eyes glimmering. He looked up, as some parts of this puzzle seemed to fit. It did not fit perfectly, but it was a start. “Every single one of these civilizations were well known for engaging in warfare very frequently. And you know who always interferes when there’s a war?”

“The Shadow Proclamation?” Senti replied.

“Exactly,” the Doctor clapped his hands. “This transmitter was most probably made by the Shadow Proclamation. Tell me, Senti. What does your databank tell you about the Shadow Proclamation?”

“Nothing more than them being the space police.”

“But something more,” he walked up towards her. “Something about them and this planet. Why would this planet interest them?”

“The same reason it probably interested you. It’s isolated. Nobody can find anyone here.”

The Doctor’s nerves shot up instantly. He remembered the reason why he came here for. It’s been so long – weeks, months? – that he’d practically forgotten it. But the memory of a time-lord is nothing but obstinately permanent, and the memories immediately flowed through him.

“No, not now,” he told himself. “Get a grip.”

He looked back at the large box, and placed his hands on it. “What was the Judoon doing here? Why are they interested in this planet? And judging by what this transmitter does, it’s not like they were trying to set a remote base here too.”

He turned to Senti.

“I’m searching my banks as much as I can. I can find no connections between the queries `Judoon` and `Planet.Origin`”

“Is that what you call this planet?” The Doctor asked. “Planet dot Origin?”

Senti cocked her head to the side. “We are mass manufactured, Doctor. We were made in factories located on some asteroid before being rocketed off to all the planets that they could see.”

The Doctor’s smile dropped. “They,” he thought. “Who is they?”

And for the first time since they met, the Doctor genuinely felt like Senti might be a threat to his life, and whatever else is at stake here.

* * *

_Shadow Proclamation HQ, Section 433 – Milky Way_

The main headquarters of the Shadow Proclamation was heavily populated. Mostly with the Judoon squadrons heading off to different portals and different terminals to march off into war that was technically supposed to be a deterrent. They had already sent several waves, each wave containing two destroyers, one medic-ship, each defended by two hundred space-fighters each, along with the several hundred armed guards inside the destroyers and medic-ship each.

Sitting in the chief office, the Chief Architect was getting slightly impatient. She opened the map of the entire Solar System on her holographic monitor, and she zoomed close to Earth. There wasn’t any kind of noticeable armament. Not that it really meant anything. Earth was a level 2 civilization. Under the circumstance of an all-out war, the technological comparison between the Judoon and Humans were equivalent to comparing sticks and stones to nuclear missiles.

Something caught her eye. She zoomed out slowly until she reached a clear discontinuity. The asteroid belt. She zoomed towards the belt, and she found a lot of defense bases. On several asteroids.

“Of course,” the whispered to herself. “That belt there is their first line of defense. They must have formed those bases during the war.”

She zoomed in further to confirm some suspicions. She was right. This was their _only_ line of defense.

She pulled her tele-communicator, and said, “I need two waves to get to the Asteroid Belt and force the human army bases there to surrender. Copy?” And she slammed the communicator down before hearing any responses.

Mere seconds later the communicator rang. She raised her eyebrow. The last time someone rang through this communicator, the Daleks had captured Earth and other planets (that included, to her surprise, Clom) and placed them in suspended animation to create the crucible that placed the entirety of reality at risk. As much as she would hate to admit it, she secretly acknowledged that there was nothing the Shadow Proclamation could have done. Not without the Doctor.

She placed her pale, shivering hand over the communicator, and picked it up quickly, like removing used bandage. “Yes?” she said, quietly.

“Squadron 23 of Wave 2 has been annihilated. They were fifteen kloks inside the Oort cloud before ballistic missiles struck them from unknown origins. The other waves have been stalled for now, awaiting further orders.”

“Good call, do not enter the Oort cloud,” she said, as she pulled the holographic map of the Solar System again. The Oort cloud was pretty far away from the actual Sun. There was no way humans could have been behind this. Not this petty, level 2 civilization. “Standby until further orders. For the time being, dedicate all personnel to locate the source of the attack. We have to move quickly. We might have more hostile elements than expected.”

“Understood.”

The communicator crackled dead.

If the humans were to hypothetically attack anyone entering the Oort cloud, several billion kloks away from Earth, then their war against the Europans must have elevated to such an extreme, they must have developed more than they expected.

“There is no time to lose”, she thought. “It needs to be done now.”

She opened a small glass casing that could only be unlocked by a key. The key was so old and rusty that nobody had used it ever since the creation of this key. Opening the glass case revealed a large purple button. Her index finger hovered over it with increasing uncertainty.

For the safety of the Universe!

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The Doctor crouched over the console, and took a couple of deep breaths. His mind was racing. He couldn’t figure out if the thoughts darting through his mind were rational or just being plain paranoid.

War does that to a man.

“Senti,” he said, not moving an inch. “Do you mind waiting outside for a minute.”

Senti obeyed. There was no resistance, no reluctance, no attempt to investigate the inner workings of his mind. That’s the difference between humans and a robot. A robot is designed to serve. If not serve, then to achieve a single incentive providing service. In any case, there are no incentives Senti might receive by trying to understand what the Doctor was going through.

Senti stood at the door, and asked, “Should I return to the bar?”

“I’m not detaining you here, am I?” the Doctor responded from his frozen posture.

“I’ll wait outside,” she said and shut the door close.

The TARDIS hummed for the first time since the two of them entered the TARDIS. It was like a sigh released by a person hiding in a closet while eavesdropping on two newcomers into the room, while holding their breath. The Doctor could decipher this cryptic hum, but chose to ignore it.

He chose this planet specifically to prevent his mind from exploding. With everything that had happened, everything before Europa, everything that happened _because_ of Europa, stupid _stupid_ , Amanda, and of course, the stupid war. The hours preceding his landing on Europa, till these last couple of days…? Months? However long of a time period he spent on this timeless planet.

Every single ticking second went by with a billion synapses exploding in his brain like a newborn supernova, stretching the peripherals of its dying parent star to reveal a singular core behind. The Doctor was in a desperate search for that core.

A neutron star. The perfect metaphor. A neutron star is one of the three end products one would find after a supernova event. It’s the most peaceful of the three, and perhaps the one that the Doctor found most attraction and fascination towards. The magnetic fields it emanated, dancing around like waves traversing across yards of silk, the gravitational waves rocking the TARDIS like a boat on unkind seas. Neutron stars might be the most stable, but it definitely was still hostile, what with the cocktail of ionizing radiation that rendered this very planet sterile.

It was sterility he was searching for. For several months, in hiding, after the war. All he wanted was somewhere to feel clean. A place where he felt he could cleanse his conscience. A place to feel sterile. To remove the disease of thought from his brain. The parasite that was thinking sucked on his life force and rendered him practically immobile during some of the worst crises in his life, this war being one of them.

And beyond all of that, there was the never ending, shadow casting clouds that was sorrow. It stalls all faculties of the brain from working, except when it comes to the Doctor, it works hand in hand. Emotions and rationality often confuse and combine themselves to present themselves as the perfect mixture. The perfect mixture that usually works in the Doctor’s favour and often in the favour of the peace of the Universe. But it all went so horribly wrong.

He wanted to come here to avoid everything. To avoid any potential stimulus. Anything that might restart his brain to get into Doctor-mode. He just wanted to be a dull unthinking entity for as long as he wanted.

And then he found the bar. And then he found Senti. And then he found the transmitter. And then he found the Judoon. His sense of adventure kicked in the moment he saw the bar in the distance. He hated himself for it. He wanted to pick an ice-pick and rip his gut out for feeling that brief sensation of adventurous excitement that always fueled his adventures.

How dare I. How dare I enjoy this. How dare I enjoy anything when it was supposed to be the time for me to repent. For me to do penance. How dare I experience anything other than absolute disgust and sorrow for the things I had done.

Perhaps the Doctor didn’t save the Universe or the Universe didn’t need saving. Perhaps it was a mutually beneficial exchange, where the existence of both the Doctor and the Universe was satisfied by constantly throwing things at each other, proving both of them with a sense of excitement. The excitement that erupts out of your volcanic mind when you realize you have so much more to learn. The Universe didn’t need saving. The Universe drew the Doctor to the parts where it did need to be saved and the Doctor brought along with him several more problems that the Universe would face. A vicious cycle. A cycle that extends till the death of the Universe, or of the Doctor himself, whichever came first.

These thoughts cut through his brain, and he could feel his mind bleed. It stung. It stung so badly, he fell from the console and right on to the floor, his face kissing the metal floor of the TARDIS.

He was doomed to excitement. There was simply no way out. No matter how much I run, no matter how far I run, the Universe will always be there, ready to provide me with the next round of disasters for me to circumvent.

He is the Doctor, and he saves the Universe. The Universe couldn’t care less about Amanda’s death. It sucked the Doctor into a conspiracy no matter what the Doctor was going through. Physics says nothing is colder than the Universe, but the Doctor knew that it was the case even from the perspective of poetry.

There is nothing colder than the Universe.

It presented itself almost like an evidence to the cause when the transmitter started beeping. A siren. A beacon. A combination of them all. The monitor displays **TRANSMITTING** and the box starts pulsating red. The noise is almost unbearable.

Senti rushed inside the TARDIS and squinted the moment she realized she had to readjust the input amplitude of the high volume source of this sound. “WHAT’S GOING ON?” she yelled. The Doctor, also holding himself barely together, typed a couple of commands to decipher the message that the transmitter was sending.

Two words. The Doctor’s eyes widened in horror. His eyebrows arched to an alarming height. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Senti walked towards the monitor to read what was written.

_ATTACK EARTH._

The Doctor looked up at the ceiling of the TARDIS. The Universe doesn’t wait for the Doctor. He smiled, albeit just a little bit.

The Doctor does not wait for the Universe either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last section took a bit of time to write. I've never written anything like that before.
> 
> Hopefully y'all liked it.
> 
> A comment would be nice :)


	5. LOCATE.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Earth army is mobilized for potential attacks. The hijacked plane lands in Aberdeen, of all places. The Doctor solves one more puzzle that brings him closer to the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you like this one. Plot properly starts here, I think.

# LOCATE.

_4 Vesta, Asteroid Belt – Solar System_

Timothy was standing outside his barrack, just to get some outside air. It felt weird even calling it outside air, since he was well inside the atmospheric bubble that was created to facilitate the artificial atmosphere. He’d just arrived at Vesta a couple of years ago, and he still couldn’t get used to the blatant physical differences between living on Earth and living on Vesta.

For instance, back on Earth, he woke up to a beautiful view of his father’s corn farm. It seemed to stretch in all directions, reaching the ends of the Universe itself. But now, he wakes up and he sees the drilling column left behind by the colonialists the moment the asteroid became militarized. It was such jarring imagery that reminded him of the artificiality of the life that humans had constructed around this asteroid.

It wasn’t the artificiality that annoyed him, but rather the attempt to make it seem natural. It works - but only for a while. And when the illusion snaps - say when you set your eyes on the rusty iron-titanium drilling column - it hurts so much you could feel the hurt physically.

The lights around the barrack started flowing red along with a dull but loud siren. It was a call to action. Timothy sighed, a little bit annoyed, and walked back into the barrack to fetch his uniform and call upon his mates who may or may not be asleep.

With a quick ten minute commute thanks to the recently installed transit system on Vesta, they got the main headquarters. It was supposed to be a corporate office, but was soon turned into the commander’s office. Timothy walked into the office and looked at the notice board. It informed him that his regiment should report to room 205. Nothing was new here.

When he made it, he found that the room was half-filled already, and the captain was already mid-briefing. “Am I late?” he asked. The captain shook his head and handed him a bill that gave the entirety of the briefing in bullet-form, in case someone forgot what to do during the heat of the battle.

As Timothy read through the bill, seventeen of his colleagues walked in as well, walking up to the captain, getting their own copy of the bill and sitting down on the classroom-like arranged desk system. As his eyes glided through the bill, he realized just about how ridiculous this was.

“Excuse me Captain, but what’s going on here?” he asked.

“As mentioned in the bill, 12 of the 17 regiments on the Asteroid Belt is being sent to orbit Jupiter. We have an exasolar threat, and Jupiter provides the best vantage point.”

“If we were taking the offensive, for sure. But we do not know whether we are stronger than this alien race or not? We surely weren’t prepared for the Europan invasion.”

“Times have changed since then, Sergeant. The militant power of the human race was increased exponentially since the war, and we are confident that we would succeed when positioning ourselves in an offensive position.”

“Do we know who our opponents are?”

“As far as I know, the top brass does, and they made specific instructions to make sure we do not.”

“We as in…?”

“Everyone who is not on Earth and protecting Earth.”

Timothy leaned back, his mouth open in exasperation. They were a decoy. A dummy. A distraction. Of course, Earth gets Priority Number Zero, and nothing else above it, but to treat entire swaths of the army as disposable was something he could never get his head around.

“In any case, this regiment will move to Jupiter in about two hours, and the round might last over 80 hours, so you will have to pack. Dismissed.”

Walking out of the classroom, Timothy walked up to his captain and said, “We need to defend the Belt, that’s where our army is. We would have an advantage both in terms of offense and defense. You know this is true.”

The captain turned back and smiled sadly, “I know this is true. I also know that I don’t have the power to make decisions here.”

* * *

_International Airport, Dyce, Aberdeen – Scotland_

The prompters in the radio tower were confused by this flight that had no communications with them at all. It just entered the Aberdeen airspace and landed. The supervisor guessed it might have been a hijacking, but as his subordinate pointed out, “Why would hijackers come to Aberdeen of all places?”

Their suspicions were confirmed when the emergency exit of the plane was opened and laser beams shot out of the airplane cabin, striking right at the control room, killing everyone immediately.

The wheels of the 747 touched the runway, and seven of the Judoon soldiers jumped out of the emergency exit before the plane ever came to a stop. They dropped to the ground and rolled to preserve some of the momentum and ran directly towards the terminal exit.

The human guards there, with their puny semi-automatics could do nothing to impede the invasion of the Judoon. The low caliber bullets did nothing to the Judoon’s body armour, and it only took five rounds of bullets before one of the seven put a bullet in the guard’s forehead.

That was all Kate could see from the window of her first-class cabin. Surrounding her were two soldiers, not entirely afraid of this eighty year old woman who is strapped to a hospital bed. They too were looking outside the window, in silent observation. Kate could only assume that people were screaming right now, as the galaxy’s strongest army ripped through the measly humans to gain complete access of the Aberdeen Airport. She still couldn’t understand why they would choose the Abderdeen Airport (instead of say, Heathrow, in which case they’d have access to the entirety of the European Union if it came to it) but it came to a point where it almost seemed satirical.

Twenty minutes later, Kate noticed the red light on both of her guards’ wrists turned green. They looked at each other and nodded. It must be complete.

But Kate did not spend the last twenty minutes being completely idle. In fact, ever since she heard the cabin depressurize thanks to one of the soldiers opening the emergency exit and saw the control tower explode with brilliant orange light that temporarily flooded her own cabin, she began to work on her retaliation strategy, which wasn’t much.

The Judoon were taking the matter of Kate’s illness a bit too seriously and underestimated her. She managed to loosen the grip of the suspenders that were tied across her till she managed to move her arms freely. For some reason they didn’t bind her hands.

She pulled her hands up, and held on to the wall and pushed herself as hard as she could. The bed then rammed directly onto one of the guards who fell on the other, who accidentally fired his laser pistol aiming at the roof of the cabin. She stepped off the hospital bed, and picked up her own revolver which was stored in the same first-aid tray after they had captured her. She walked up to the soldiers, removed their helmets, and shot them before they could even react.

For an eighty year old, not shabby at all.

She walked out of the first class cabin and into the economy cabin, which was missing its emergency exit door. She held her revolver-arm steady, and held it straight in front of her. The excitement pumped through her veins and her heart was taking it well. She might actually have been cured of whatever heart sickness she must have had in Svalbard. Or who knew, the magical properties of Scotland must have actually cured her. Either way, the adrenaline certainly made her heart beat faster, to such an extent she didn’t have to concentrate for too long to find her heartbeat, but it didn’t hurt, and that was all that mattered.

Until she realized she didn’t turn back in time, and a soldier had crept up on her. He had heard noises from the lower level and had walked down from the cockpit. Seeing this woman walk around in a robe armed with a revolver made him realize she was more hostile than they anticipated and pulled out a device that resembled a taser gun for humans.

Without a second thought he pressed the trigger that supercharged the gun in five seconds. the whirring noise alerted Kate, but it was fully charged by the time she could turn around. She might have actually been safe if she hadn’t turned around.

The taser gun was built with a mechanism that had a fork-like tip that extended like the tongue of a chameleon once the second trigger was fired. The fork would lodge itself onto the victim and several million volts of current would pass through the forks directly into the skin of the victim. It should do more than just temporarily paralyze the victim, which is what the Judoon wanted. They had no intention to kill her - they needed her alive.

Alas, they did not take into account that she was old, and that she was recovering from a cardiac arrest. The fork lodged itself directly onto her sternum and the pulse of electricity arced along her ribs till they found the sinoatrial node which fried the nervous fibers that connected to her heart. Instant arrhythmia. The positioning of the fork not only fried the nerves but also reversed the polarity of the pacemaker cells, making her heart abruptly stop, unable to keep up with the fluctuating levels of electricity.

The taser should have knocked out her motor functions temporarily but the perfect positioning of the fork, her medical condition and not to mention, the adrenaline pumping through her weakened heart, caused her to suffer a severe cardiac arrest which proved to be fatal.

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The Doctor rushed around the console to inspect the transmitter box directly. He had the information. Now he wanted to see how it worked. He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and opened the panel with relative ease.

“What’s going on?”

“Well, clearly, the Shadow Proclamation is trying to attack Earth. Even if it isn’t the Shadow Proclamation, someone with very powerful technology is trying to attack Earth.”

“And you’re going to stop it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He turned around and paused for a moment. “Reflex.”

He spent a lot of time looking at the circuitry, but it being hybrid, he found it a little difficult to orient himself to a particular technology. Soon he realized it was not just that the origins of the components were hybrid, the very manner of setting it up was hybrid as well. He found the central computer so to speak, and it acted like a spinal cord connecting some of the other components. Two in particular were the largest of them all, but as individual components they seemed to be incomplete.

Why this planet? Why this transmitter?

And then within seconds, the components connect with the environment and he realized what was going on. He disconnected the signal jamming circuit (which was suspiciously similar to the same components as the TARDIS handbrake circuit) and turned back to Senti and said, “You might want to sit for this.”

“…for what?”

The Doctor sonic-ed the console and the TARDIS immediately rumbled back into animated life. They were moving. The TARDIS shook violently, as traveling through distorted gravitational fields would do to it, and it then became still again. Senti sat in the same place, while the Doctor ran to the door and opened it. He could see the neutron star in the center, the planet orbiting it, and then did some mental calculations. It just might be the case.

He ran back under the console and pulled out what was a long pole with some probe at the end. “This maps magnetic fields. And the TARDIS can directly detect gravitational waves. Which means…” he said as he poked the probe out the door, and connected the other end of the stick to an open port on the console. He pulled the monitor and the keyboard to his side and started typing some commands into the computer and then it was on the screen. “Of course, that’s why they needed this planet.”

Senti felt her synthetic synapses slow down. “What do you mean?”

“This isn’t the main transmitter,” the Doctor said, unplugging the box and waving it front of her. “This is just the computer that tells the main transmitter what to do.”

“There’s another transmitter?”

The Doctor triumphantly pointed to the neutron star out the door. “That isn’t a normal neutron star, it’s a rotating neutron star.”

“And rotating neutron stars create gravitational waves.”

“But they also have rotating magnetic fields, which means they are also making magnetic waves.”

“…so?” She doesn’t remember ever being this slow.

“This computer, while sitting on the planet, modulates the gravitational waves while sitting on the planet. The planet was the tool to modulate the waves, but the box did most of the commanding work,” he said, pointing to a long transparent tube that had two laser beams, one pulsating and one steady in them. “The other component is like any electromagnetic transmitter, but except it forcefully only affects the magnetic and not the electric field.”

He placed the box back on the console, and started monologuing. It almost didn’t matter whether or not Senti was paying attention. This was something he had to get out of his head. He could feel his brain heat up.

“The message, the one we heard - _ATTACK EARTH_ \- was sent in two parts. Why two parts? Doesn’t matter. Some parts of the message were sent using magnetic waves and some using gravitational waves. It’s either that, or one of the two waves were used as the main carrier and the other as the modulator. Yes, yes, yes, Senti, do you see it? That precisely what this is. The magnetic fields contains the actual information, but the gravitational waves are carrying it.”

The Doctor froze as he realized what this meant. He didn’t even turn to Senti for this moment of realization. “This message is rippling through all of time. We need to-” he was interrupted by a loud thud.

He rushed to see Senti fall on the ground. Metal endoskeleton makes a loud noise when it slams against the metal floor, even ignoring the pseudo-organic skin. The Doctor held her up, and her eyes were only half open.

Senti was dying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how frequently I will upload from here on out, because I have enough cause to believe that the upcoming chapters will be longer and more action packed, probably, and also deal with more emotional moments. Also, my real life will going through a turbulent period of the next couple of months, so I should come out with the next chapter in another two months. Eep.
> 
> But it's only a couple more chapters left. Promise.


	6. DESTROY.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aftermath after the destruction at the Aberdeen airport, the Doctor finds out something about Senti, the regiment at the asteroid belt prepare for an attack, causing the Shadow Proclamation to make some pretty drastic decisions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a while to get this up. It's up now. And we're reaching the beginning of the end.

# DESTROY.

_Aberdeen, Scotland_

Aberdeen is one of those places that looks like it was left undisturbed for several thousand years. The buildings are extremely old, covered with mould that comes off only because of the occasional rainfall. The stone buildings have had their sharp corners smoothed out by all the rain and the wind that it literally screamed _OOOLLLDDDDD_.

And right in the middle of the city was the airport that was set ablaze by the Shadow Proclamation. It glowed brightly, illuminating the entire city like an oil lamp in the middle of a cold mine. Aberdeen weather was never pleasant, the skies always gray, and it was especially worse because it was winter. The soft shadows from th sun was overtaken by the harsh dancing shadows from the flames that reached several hundred feet in the sky from the burning airport.

The fire column was on purpose of course. This was a siren. An alarm. An attack that announces your presence to this world. Most of what the Shadow Proclamation do are extremely sneaky, similar to surgical strikes conducted by intelligence agents. But very rarely, they get the opportunity to be a part of a war. And in rarer situations they _get_ to start the war. And that’s when the Judoon get all excited and cause all damage possible. The more scraps you get back from the war, the more your wartime compensation is.

A pack of twelve Judoon soldiers marched back from the burning terminal. “Shit,” one said, accidentally stepping on the burnt arm of one of the humans in the fire. “Just how frail are these humans?”

“We too are that frail, should we remove our shells,” the leader of the pack said. “The Daleks are also frail, in that sense. But with their armour… well…”

They boarded the 747 that they had brought from Svalbard, and walked into the Economy cabin, to find a soldier crouched on the aisle. “Soldier 2433, what’s the problem?” the leader said. The crouching soldier turned back, his face twisted with fear, “It was an accident.”

The leader pushed him away, deforming the seats on the right side. He looked at Kate’s dead body, her eyes wide open, clearly in pain. He pulled out a probe that has a spherical tip, and pressed it against her temple. The display in the probe showed a flat line. No brain or cardiac activity. He pocketed the probe and turned back to 2433. “Explain, soldier.”

“I heard gunshots,” the soldier begins the explain, as the leader walks towards the first class cabin. The door is open, and there are burn marks from the blaster. He touches its periphery gently. “I was upstairs, and I came here to investigate. The UNIT Chief was walking here, and I electro-paralyzed her, just to be safe.”

The leader pushed the door wide open and sees the two dead soldiers, one pinned under the hospital bed, and the other next to the door. He looked up and saw a clear cut scorch mark on the roof from the blaster that was in the hand of the one who was pinned under the hospital bed. Both of them, without their helmets, and a bullet in their heads.

The UNIT Chief was a lot more dangerous than they previously thought. Was it a good thing that she was dead? Probably not. They could have extracted so much information from her. He planned to have so much fun extracting that information from her. Furious, the leader pulled out a blaster and shot 2433 right in his right eyeball without even looking. This meant 2433 had about three minutes to live. The leader walked over to 2433, bending over to see his writhing body, now on the floor, and said, “You knew she had a cardiac problem. And you used an electrical paralyzer and not the chemical one that has been stored in canisters?”

2433 was wailing, his brain conflicted between reacting to his life force being sucked out of him and attempting to answer to the leader that he couldn’t find the canisters in time.

The leader looked straight at the shocked pack of 11 who witnessed all this happen. “Did anyone else think that 2433 was such a wailer?”

They shook their heads collectively.

“Neither did I,” he said and fired another shot, effectively silencing 2433.

A siren went off in the cockpit, and the twelve soldiers looked up. The leader grunted, immensely displeased with the way the things were going. He climbed up the stairs into the cockpit, and saw one Judoon operator sitting with his headphones on, listening to radio communications, while the yellow bulb was flashing on and off. He looked through the gigantic windshields of the 747 and saw a small black smudge in the distance.

No. It couldn’t be.

Helicopters. With the sides of the choppers decorated with the bright and vibrant insignia of UNIT.

* * *

_???,??? – ???_

The Doctor drags Senti downstairs, and opens up the workshop from underneath the console. He places her on top of the table and removes her clothes, which reveals a small panel that was also in the same colour of her skin. He uses the sonic to open the panel, and inside he could see the glow of the complicated circuitry. “Senti, can you hear me?”

She returned some garbled response that the Doctor couldn’t make out. Something was getting corrupted. Something was going wrong. He pulled out the central hub that seemed to be some kind of muonic multiplexer.

“Wait a minute,” he thought, with the cube in his hand, the wires hanging from the cube and inside Senti. “Humans haven’t yet created muonic instruments. Not for another million years. I know I’ve moved a lot from the 21st century, but… definitely not a million years.”

He placed the cube on the desk, with Senti lying there, moaning incomprehensibly, quietly, her eyes tracking the Doctor running upstairs to the console. He reached for the monitor and typed a couple of commands into the keyboard. “Good, I haven’t lost my sense of time yet,” he said, and came running down. “I still have something going for me, then.”

He picked up the cube again and started using the sonic on the cube. The cube split open, and he was able to see the circuit board inside. And there it was - what he suspected. The mark of Skaro.

“You’re dalek?” he asked Senti. Her eyes were randomly rolling around at this point. He placed the cube on the table, and started digging inside more and more, and he could only find more and more muonic components, all of them tattooed with the mark of Skaro. “That’s how you knew I was the Doctor. That’s how you know all these things. You have access to the Skaro Database. That’s why–”

The Doctor was about to enter a long monologue about how he shouldn’t be too trusting, but he was interrupted by a metallic disc. He hadn’t seen such a disc in such a long time. He almost couldn’t identify it. He placed it on top of a small container that was attached to the workstation, which analyzed that disc. It was definitely some alloy of graphene and neodymium, but he couldn’t recall which race had it, because the Daleks certainly didn’t use graphene in their weaponry.

The result came back. It was human.

The Doctor took a couple of steps back. This didn’t make any sense. “Human? You’re human?”

He walked to and fro, his head nearly slamming against the metal flooring of the main room that doubled as a ceiling for the workstation room. “You have dalek tech. You also have human tech. But the humans haven’t _met_ the daleks yet, so there’s no way either of the species could have made you. Not only did they make you, whoever it was, they also throw you on an abandoned planet, like a pilot fish. Is that what you are? A pilot fish?”

And then it clicked. He didn’t understand how it clicked, and he decided this would be a metaphysical problem he would deal with later, but now all that mattered was confirming his new hypothesis. He walked back to the robot on the table, and started pulling out more and more components out. He had to find a component from one more race and– there it was. A metal that was used for the endoskeleton, clearly repurposed from the armour of the Ice Warriors of Mars.

“You’re just like the transmitter.”

He ran upstairs without a second thought. Too many questions, literally no answers. He had nothing to go on either. Also he didn’t have the patience to ponder about the answer as well. The Shadow Proclamation was going to attack Earth, and for some reason, this robot is also created by the Proclamation. None of this made any sense. He was going to get the answer from the horse’s mouth.

He set his space and time vector to the Shadow Proclamation headquarters. He pulls the handbrake. The TARDIS shook. It had to escape the rolling gravitational blanket of the neutron star, but also go about a million years into the past. Back when the first war began. The war that began all consequent wars.

Not this time. No one shall die if I can prevent it.

* * *

 _4 Vesta, Asteroid Belt -- Solar System_  
  
The sunlight on Vesta was blocked by a large group of asteroids that eclipsed the midday sun. Timothy was amazed about these occurrences the first week he was here, but got used to it pretty quickly, and remains to date as the only thing that he got used to on this desolate asteroid.  
  
He sat on his troop's cabin inside the command center, watching the miscoloured skies through the tinted windows. There was a loud hum from outside the cabin, orders flying around everywhere to different sections of the same troop about an apparent oncoming attack. He still wasn't pleased with the decision that the chiefs back on Earth had taken, but he had signed up for this job, and swore an oath to defend the Earth. He didn't realize that the small print would be also to go on suicide missions - even though it was a part of the oath - and isn't ready to accept it in its entirety.  
  
His cabin was steel grey, filled with two opposing rows of steel chairs painted in black, stuffed with other soldiers from the same troop. The soldiers adjacent to Timothy were shivering with fear, their hands shaking to such an extent that even grabbing their water cans as tightly as possible didn't hide it.  
  
The captain of his troop, Captain Silva, watched his soldiers realize their imminent doom in a matter of a couple of hours.  
  
"Captain," he heard a voice behind him. It was an office boy. "The Commander wished to see you."  
  
Silva stood up from his seat which was placed at the very end of the cabin perpendicular to the rows of seats. He walked towards the central podium where the Commander of the regiment was talking to someone who was from the recon section. "Commander."  
  
The Commander looked at him, and pointed at the screen. "We've noticed some object using gravity assists from Jupiter. See that? That's the gravitational field of Jupiter distorting because of the object."  
  
"And judging by the distortion, I assume we know how heavy this object is?"  
  
"Not just mass, Captain," the recon boy said. "We've made a model of what the object might look like." and proceeded to touch a widget on the right of the touch panel which showed a 3D model of the object.  
  
"It's a ship." Silva muttered.  
  
"Probably from the potential threat that Earth was talking about." the Commander said.  
  
"Where are they now?" Silva asked.  
  
"They are on an extremely eccentric orbit around Jupiter, but they will be within the orbital plane of Ganymede within the next half hour."  
  
Silva looked at the Commander who had a sombre look. "They're here," he muttered sadly. Silva looked down to the floor, his mind racing for possible solutions. Should they call for an evacuation? Should they start the process of slowing the ship down? Can they even impede the ship's progress through the Solar System?  
  
And then a solution struck him like lightning from the heavens.  
  
"Half hour to Ganymede, you said?" Silva asked the recon boy.  
  
"To the orbit, captain. There is a nearly zero per cent chance that it would collide with Ganymede."  
  
"Okay, but here me out. I'm not scientific, but I think I am not too far off in assuming the following. After the Europan war and the effects of their hydrogen engines, Ganymede is mostly just regolith at this point, yes?"  
  
The recon boy nodded.  
  
"That means, if were to disturb it, then it could shatter the moon adequately enough to form a ring around the orbit?"  
  
"You'd need a nuclear weapon to disturb it enough to push it to that extent, but it won't exceed the Roche limit."  
  
"Meaning?"  
  
"The shattered pieces will quickly gather back to form the moon."  
  
"How long?" the Commander asked, slowly getting to the same idea that struck the Captain's head.  
  
The recon boy scratched his head for a while. "Hard to say. Probably half a year."  
  
"That's more than enough," Silva looked at the Commander. "Breaking it into smaller pieces will considerably increase the velocity of the broken parts. We need to time it well enough for the shattered pieces to intersect with the ship's trajectory around Jupiter."  
  
"Time for what?" the recon boy asked.  
  
"We're going to nuke Ganymede," the Commander smiled. "The regolith should perforate the ship. Hopefully. Our armies are in between orbital transfers anyway, so even if it fails, it should have weakened the ship enough that we can survive our own attack."  
  
Silva nodded. He dismissed the recon boy who walked away in mute horror. The Commander sighed, and looked back to the monitor. "UNIT isn't going to like this decision. Certainly not those lunatics who want Jupiter's moons to be maintained as it is."  
  
"I'm sure they'll make exceptions for the continued existence of the human race."  
  
"We've had a close shave before, Captain. I doubt we'd be nearly as lucky this time round."  
  
"We might not, Commander. We don't have the Doctor this time." The Captain saluted, and returned to his cabin.  
  
The remaining half an hour was filled with mental torment. He had to truly come to terms with the fact that they might be wiped out.  
  
A messenger boy came by and gave him a small piece of paper, with a handwritten note that was clearly the Commander's.  
  
 _Ganymede destruction at +0.02633 Vesta Coordinated Time. Unidentified Hostile Ship successfully annihilated._  
  
Silva let out a sigh of relief. Not today.

* * *

 

_Shadow Proclamation HQ, Section 433 – Milky Way_

The Shadow Architect looked at her monitor in utter disbelief. She had no idea what struck the stealth ship, but it had practically obliterated it.

Either it was the Europans, which was impossible because they are extinct now, thanks to their war on Earth. Or it was Earth itself.

They managed to attack a ship entering the Oort cloud, and managed to decimate a ship entering the asteroid belt.

Their fear was almost palpable. This should be good news for the Architect. But the mere strength of humankind terrified her also, in a manner that she had not previously expected.

She opened a document and composed a declaration. It automatically became a part of the Shadow Charter, which was possible only under emergency situations. The discretion of what and what didn’t count as an emergency belonged to the Architect, but this time she truly felt like she wasn’t abusing her power.

If the Shadow Proclamation was to continue existing, then this was absolutely necessary.

The declaration was as follows:

> The Solar planet known as Earth and its inhabitants are now declared as a Level 3 Civilisation, after demonstrating their capacity to distort galactic political boundaries.

The following declaration, which was unnecessary, but she felt needed to be spelled out, said:

> Following a previous declaration (P.no. 5663251), a declaration of war against the dominant civilisation on Earth, and their recent upgradation to Level 3 and following Article 9981299, the weapon also named The Obliterator™ shall be used in the war against Earth.

* * *

_En-route from ???,??? – ??? to the Shadow Proclamation_

Senti doesn’t really understand what was causing these discontinuities in her artificial consciousness. Every time she wakes up, she gets a flood of data in terms of both visuals and audios.

Her local memory banks are suffering with these surges in information. Her processors try to extrapolate the information found in these memory banks to fill in the gaps in consciousness, but it can only do what is statistically most certain, and sometimes these gaps are not filled completely.

But she was suddenly awake for what was unnaturally long given the last couple of minutes. She found herself on a desk, connected with wires to the TARDIS mainframe. She moved her head a little bit and saw the Doctor through the holes on the floor of the console room. He was bending over, looking at the monitor, probably looking at the diagnostic details from her own robotic body. And th–

– e – Docto – shak – parks fl –

The next time she recovered consciousness, she was on the top floor, sitting on one of the couches. The Doctor was lying down on the couch on the opposite side. She tried getting up, but she wasn’t able to. Her processor whirred but to no avail. The Doctor must have noticed the barely audible whirring, because in a couple of seconds, he stood up and walked towards her.

“Sorry I had to deactivate a couple of things so that you can have a long enough stream of consciousness.”

“Like my motor functions?”

“Except for your mouth. You don’t have a speaker, you actually have something that simulates organic voice. In a less stressful time, I would probably be so interested in that piece of tech that I would want to pry you open and find out what happened, but – now is not one of those times.”

Senti whirred past her extrapolated memories. “Didn’t you already?”

“Only the parts that concerned me,” the Doctor said. “How are you doing?”

Senti couldn’t even run her own diagnostics. It wasn’t long before she realized she simply couldn’t find the files required.

Her local memory banks were also fading, and it didn’t have memories that were older than a couple of days. It didn’t take her long to realize what she lost.

“I can’t connect to the database,” she looked up at the Doctor. “Did you remove the transmitter to the database?”

“No, it’s very much still inside you,” the Doctor raised your eyebrow. “Is that where you got your information from? Do you know where it’s from?”

Senti felt like she was suffocating, or whatever the muonic equivalent of that was. The realization that she couldn’t do half the things she was built for was starting to hit her hard, and that was setting the diagnostic parts of her into overdrive. Her brain wanted to run diagnostics, because that’s what it was trying to do, but there was no instruction manual to follow, because the diagnostic files were in the remote database.

“I — I don’t know,” she said, with a clear indication of a slur in her voice, almost like she was getting drunk.

“Are you… are you losing your memories?”

“Something – like – that –”

The Doctor stood up, and walked away from the dying robot and toward the console. He knew what was going on. Or he just had a hypothesis. Either the robot was dying because they were getting closer to the Shadow Proclamation, or she was dying because they were getting farther away from the Planet.

The second option seemed to make more sense, because if she was truly designed to be a bartender at the edge of the Universe, then she would need a databank that was disconnected from where she was.

Who knows, there probably was a huge databank right under the bar.

But for now, the Doctor knew that Senti was nothing more than an empty shell with the mere ability to ask questions and make decisions and whatnot. She has probably resorted to the kind of programming that sends her into an emergency mode that occupies her customers while some kind of diagnostic runs in the background.

But he was standing several feet away from her and he could hear her brain whirring behind him. It couldn’t find the diagnostic files, probably. The whirring started sounding less like a fan spinning at high speed and more like a human squealing as it was getting crushed under a compacter.

“D – Doctor?”

Goddamn it. Why does everyone have to die? Why around him? Why always around him?

Senti would have probably led a happy artificially induced sentient life on an abandoned planet, and not in pain right now. Her brain was incredibly sluggish, desperate to gasp for some air that it knows exists, but doesn’t know where.

“Doc – Doctor.”

The Doctor turned around. He hated himself for thinking about himself when this semi-sentient being was undergoing slow death. The best he could do - as he always did - was to listen to the dying words of a friend.

“Why — Why did you come to the Planet?”

He didn’t hear her wrong. She wanted to know what he was doing there.

“Who were you trying to run – run – run — run from?”

Senti became quiet soon after, but her eyes were fixed at the Doctor’s face, twisted with pain and anguish.

“Why were you trying to be – be – be all alone?”

The Doctor took a deep breath. The emergency program was kicking in. It wanted to customer to talk until it found the solution for its problem, which both Senti and the Doctor knew didn’t exist.

There was nothing but quiet, and the rumbling of the TARDIS as it hurled itself through space and time towards the Shadow Proclamation a couple of years after the war.

“There was a war,” the Doctor said. “I had a friend. A companion.”

Quiet again.

“She was killed.”

The quiet was longer this time. It seemed like the TARDIS quietened down, almost in respect for the deceased companion.

“Wha – wha – w – happened?”

The Doctor winced as the memories cut through his brain. Hopefully for the last time.

Hopefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand we're finally getting to the chapter where I finally get to talk about what happened before this story began.
> 
> This story kind of evolved every single week, with a changing back story, so I think it should be good, but there might also be a problem with the fact that there might be some inconsistencies. But I'm too lazy to edit the inconsistencies out, so I'm sorry if it ruins the whole suspension of disbelief thing.
> 
> Please comment!


	7. COLD. (part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We finally get to see what started this whole story off - the Doctor's last companion : Amanda.
> 
> The troops on Earth prepare themselves for the oncoming invasion with a secret weapon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter got way out of hand -- and might actually be the longest single chapter I've ever written.
> 
> Just for the sake of flow, I'm splitting this chapter into two different chapters, COLD (part 1) and COLD (part 2) which basically has the same mini-arc, but needs to be in two different chapters before I make a single chapter that lasts 10,000 words.

# COLD.

### (part one)

_San Francisco, California -- United States (before the Europan War)_

The Doctor was waiting in the TARDIS while Amanda was packing her bags. She called him when she finished her final exam and asked for one thing - she wanted to go on an extra-terrestrial vacation.

The Doctor found this odd.

Firstly, they've been on nearly eighty three adventures and all of them only involved going either back in time or forward in time.

Except for the one time when he took her to the Low Earth Orbit, just to show her that the TARDIS is not just a time vessel.

Amanda wanting to do something that did _not_ involve messing with time just struck him as extremely odd.

Secondly, Amanda isn't the type of person who voluntarily goes out on adventures so to speak.

Of those eighty three adventures, eighty of them were because the Doctor dragged her out of her room to make sure that she saw the outside world from time to time before she forgets what it looks like. The other three were because of timey-wimey stuff that took them along for a ride without asking them.

Of all the companions he's had, Amanda is perhaps the most studious. Academically, she might actually be the most intelligent of the lot. Other fields, like social life-wise? Not so much.

He pulled out a fob watch from the inner pocket of his coat. It's been hours since she called. He'd parked in the usual position. What was taking her so long?

He walked outside the TARDIS into the chilly (well, foggy) SF winter night, a couple of blocks away from the University of California, Berkeley Campus. Plastered all over the walls of the buildings was a campaign poster saying **Harvey Milk for Mayor**.

He pulled his hoodie on in a shabby attempt to mingle with the hoodie-wearing crowd of Berkeley. It was a terrible 'disguise' because nobody expects a tall, old Scottish man lurking around in the streets of Berkeley. Unless he was a narc. Him appearing from the **Police Box** also probably didn't help.

He walked towards the dorms, made his way up to her floor and knocked on her door. "Come in," her voice came. The door was unlocked.

He walked in and he found her on the bed, reading an Asimov novel.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"What are _you_ doing?" she replied in his tone.

He shut the door and sat on the chair next to her desk. "I've been waiting for you for _hours_."

"Well, I've been waiting for you for _days_. Didn't the campus seem suspiciously empty to you?"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Of course." He barely noticed it.

"Everyone left after the final exam five days ago. I extended my contract for a couple more days because I have a _time traveling_ alien friend who doesn't know how to _time travel._ "

"The TARDIS --"

"--is garbage."

"I wouldn't call it that."

"What would you call it?"

"..vintage," he said after a second of thought.

She smiled back. "Garbage."

The Doctor stood up, incredibly offended. "Tell that to the number of time travel trips you've had."

"That thing is not at all reliable. Who knows, the next time you take me on that thing you're going to end up going to Hell and get me killed or something."

"I've actually been to hell. Nice place. It was a while ago. Shouldn't hurt to visit again."

"I told you that I wanted to come someplace that was _not_ Earth. Where are we going?"

The Doctor turned around and saw the three brightly coloured duffel bags and one large bulging suitcase. He looked back at her and said, "Someplace amazing -- you won't ever forget it."

"We're not actually going to Hell, are we?"

"Not this time."

Amanda shrugged, and walked out of the dorm immediately. The Doctor looked back at her stuff. He groaned as he picked them all up.

Once the Doctor managed to get to the TARDIS, magically carrying all the duffel bags and the suitcase in one go, he found Amanda leaning over the console, carefully studying the brightly coloured buttons.

She didn't touch any of the buttons - the fear of the TARDIS taking off without the Doctor was strong enough to prevent such bad decisions. The Doctor threw the bags to the metal floor, which didn't startle her.

"Never," he wheezed. "Ever make me the bellboy."

Amanda smiled and dropped onto the couch. "Need a minute?"

The Doctor had one hand on the console and was still panting. She raised a concerned eyebrow, "Are you alright?"

He stood up and straightened his wrinkly suit. "Summer vacation," he said.

"No more temporal stuff, please. I feel like puking for 48 hours after every single one of our trips."

"And you think it's because of the time traveling? Not the actual adventures themselves?"

"Let's be good scientists about it and find out."

She wore a poker face.

The Doctor sighed and sat right next to her. "Is something bothering you?"

Amanda held her poker face. She was very good at her poker face. Except for the fact that whenever she was genuinely happy she held no restraint in showing her happiness and that every time she feels anything that isn't on the side of happiness in the emotional spectrum, she immediately resorted to a poker face.

She wouldn't cry.

She wouldn't frown.

She wouldn't do anything - her face would just immediately turn blank.

Today, she looked down at her toes and whispered, "I've finished my last year in this hellhole. I want to get away from here. From the buildings. From the people. Even if it's only for a little while."

The Doctor smiled sadly. "The edge of the Universe?"

"Ha," Amanda said, leaping off the couch. "Nah, let's stay within the Solar System. I don't think I'm brave enough for trans-cosmic adventures just yet."

The Doctor walked to the console, reached for the buttons and pressed a couple of them. He pulled down the lever, and before kicking the whole thing off, he checked the monitor -- just to make sure he wasn't going to crash into the Sun.

They weren't.

"Hold on," he said and pulled the handbrake which sent ripples through the entirety of the TARDIS as it took off, flying to--

* * *

_Subterranean Ice Tunnel #3252, Europa, Jupiter Orbit -- Before the Europan War_

The TARDIS landed as it always did, with a loud thud on the inside, although the Doctor maintained that it was because of a quirk of the causal engine.

He waved his hand in front of the door, and Amanda looked back at him. She didn't look excited.

Amanda's immediate reaction to every single adventure was hesitation. She always had fun on the adventures (or so she claimed) but the moments leading to it were met with dark hesitation.

The Doctor did what he always did with her - stepped out first. For the few seconds that the door was open, the cold winds carried the fragrance of an under-bleached swimming pool into the interior of the TARDIS.

She wasn't sure if it was the familiarity of the fragrance or a brief proof for the realness of the exteriors, but it was enough for her to step into the Subterranean Tunnel of Europa.

The ice cracked under her footsteps, the sound of which echoed off the empty tunnels in the ice.

"It almost looks... man-made," she said. "Are you sure we haven't traveled to the Ice Age?"

"No, no," the Doctor ran towards her, taking great care to not slip. "We're on Europa."

"We're next to Jupiter?"

"Well, I lied, technically," he shrugged. " We aren't _on_ Europa, we're under it."

"Under the surface?"

Amanda walked around gently, in an attempt to not slip and fall while touching the ice walls. The shape of the walls reminded her of the stone age flint tools.

"The famous subterranean tunnels of Europa," The Doctor continued prancing around taking on the role of a tour guide.

Amanda raised an eyebrow. She ran her finger across the ridges. "You sure this is natural?"

"What're you talking about?"

"Did someone cut these tunnels?"

"No, these are completely natural," he walked back towards her. "While the moon was forming, a large amount of hydrogen was trapped in the core. Eventually, the outside froze and the hydrogen had to escape eventually, and it did, and it kind of boiled the ice on its way out."

Amanda continued walking deeper into the tunnels, ruminating this neat bit of trivia, until she realized the Doctor was slowly tailing her. "Why are you walking so slowly? Is there some huge angry monster in the next turn that you know something about?"

"What are you talking about? This place is empty. Dead. Well, until you lot flew all the way over here to start a research station."

Amanda smiled mockingly, "Try to keep up?"

She then turned back straight and started 'skating' instead of walking, although her sneakers were doing a terrible job of actual skating. The Doctor placed his hand on the wall to get a grip.

Perhaps, also mentally.

Almost every single one of his companion was extraordinary, even if they believed otherwise. They have, to some extent, altered the very shape of reality, or at least the reality that the Doctor cared about.

They were curious, bright, but to the Doctor, those characteristics were secondary. They were anomalies in an otherwise homogeneous stream of populace that was the human race. It's been several centuries since he first made contact with humankind and he still could understand why he found them so special.

And Amanda perhaps is the perfect manifestation of this anxiety building inside of him. She was extremely intelligent, there was no doubt, but somehow there was something about her that set her apart. Like humankind from all other intelligent species in the world.

Nothing cataclysmic has taken place yet with her -- thank goodness -- but for some reason it made him extremely worried. It didn't long before Rose became space and time itself, Donna became half-Timelord, Amy became the center of a war, and on and on the list goes.

And there's Amanda, a Physics undergrad, who hasn't ripped the universe in two.

In rare moments (such as now) he wondered if the underlying purpose behind a companion was to provide him with intellectual entertainment. As though every single one of them was a puzzle he absolutely had to solve, lest his existence would suddenly void itself of any meaning.

And from there, it doesn't take too long to extrapolate that question to the entirety of Earth and humankind.

Why does he try to save the humans every single time? There's absolutely nothing special about them.

There's absolutely nothing special about her.

Suddenly a scream erupted from the distance. No mistake, it was her voice. "AMANDA!" he yelled and ran towards the source of the sound.

After twelve seconds of searching, he found her, frozen, blood drained from her face looking at an abnormally large object frozen in a clear ice-crystal in one of the larger caverns of these tunnels.

"...Doctor?"

The Doctor immediately jumps in front of her and points his sonic at the large iceberg. He flicks it and sees the readings. "It's frozen."

"Yeah, I can see that," she managed to chuckle.

"Not just in ice. But in time." he said, not looking up from the sonic. "It's dormant. Like a crystallized virus."

"That's a virus?"

"No. I actually--" the Doctor moved back, pushing her back along with him. "-- I have no idea what this is."

The iceberg was embedded within the wall, and the ice around the thing was slightly discoloured - more purple than the tint of green that Europan ice had. It was clearer than the rest of the cavern too. Amanda was willing to wager that it was more transparent than the rest of the entire moon. The Doctor took a couple of steps closer to see the thing inside the ice.

A purple minotaur, stuck inside an ice ball.

"It's alien. No doubt."

"Is that the skin?" she said, pointing at the purple exterior.

"Maybe. Might be exoskeleton."

"Like an cockroach?"

"Or actual armour. Can you see those bezels near the neck?"

"Yeah?"

"Those are ornate ones. Nature might be real pretty sometimes, but that is handcrafted," The Doctor froze while realization. "Battle armour."

"We've found a purple minotaur, frozen in a moon that you said was supposed to uninhabited, wearing battle armour."

The Doctor grinned. "Amazing, isn't it?"

"Well, why is it here then?" she asked, getting visibly worried.

The Doctor tried looking at it the side, trying to see if he could find an insignia. "Can you see any kind of medal? A patch? Something?"

"Like the ones human armies has?"

"Precisely."

"Isn't it a bit narcissistic to assume that aliens have similar military uniforms like humans?"

"No, it's Universal."

Amanda shrugged and stepped slowly and gingerly forward. Her nose wrinkled the moment she took that step. "This smells different."

"What smells different?"

"The ice."

"That's because parts of the ice are probably several million years old -- whenever this soldier got frozen."

"Really wacky cryogenic preservation?"

His eyes widened the moment she said that. "Amanda, stand back," he said.

"Okay," she said, without protest. Don't disobey experts, her motto was.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic, "That was a really good idea."

"Cryogenic preservation?"

"Temporal preservation, yes. Why didn't I come up with it?"

"What are you doing right now?"

"Confirming it," and he increased the intensity of the sonic, making it buzz louder and louder.

**_GONG, GONG, GONG_ **

The cloister bell in the TARDIS rang, its wails echoed through the empty ice tunnels. The Doctor stopped the sonic once he heard it. He realized what he had done.

"What's that?" she asked.

"The TARDIS cloister bell," he said, jumping back from the iceberg. "It's like a fire alarm, except instead of a building, it's the very fabric of space and time."

Amanda took a look at the only time anomaly in the room that wasn't the Doctor or herself. "Oh, no."

The iceberg cracked and a bright light shone from the fault-line. "RUN!" the Doctor said, but Amanda was already running away.

She ran back to the TARDIS, and the Doctor entered the TARDIS after her.

"Where should we go?" she asked, panting. The cold air was not good for human lungs.

"The surface," the Doctor said, and pressed a couple of buttons.

"You want to _stay_ here?"

"Well we don't want to run away from a perfectly fine adventure, do we?" he said and pulled the lever that sent the TARDIS moving.

"No," she protested, finally. " _You_ don't want to run away. I don't like this. Not one bit."

The TARDIS stopped humming. They've landed. The Doctor immediately runs outside and stops at the door. He turned around, "Deal with your problems. Don't avoid them. If you don't know how to, then learn."

Amanda's eyes welled up, and she struggled to stand straight. She held on to the edge of the couch, and rubbed her eyes dry. She wouldn't quit - not this time, not again.

She followed him through the door, and found herself in the middle of what can only be described as a clean room of a research facility.

The room was white, including the ceiling and the ceramic floor. It was also extremely quiet, because four human scientists just saw a blue box fade in out of nowhere, an extremely elderly hooded man and his twenty two year old physics graduate sidekick appear from what should be an incredibly cramped box.

"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, wearing his shades. "This is my friend, Amanda. Nice to meet you. Where are we?"

The scientists didn't move an inch.

"Okay," he sighed. "Nod if we're right. Are we on Europa?"

Slow nod.

"Well, I got something right," he turned back to Amanda who nodded, and then back at the scientists. "Are you studying the water systems here?"

Slow nod.

"Are you by any chance looking for potential for life on Europa."

The scientists blink at each other, not knowing if they should breach classified secrets to the magician who just walked out of a small blue box. One nods, unsure.

"Did you know there's a huge purple minotaur underneath the surface?"

Nobody nods.

"Was there an earthquake sometime recently?" Amanda piped in.

Nervous fast nods.

The tremors start again. The equipment rattle. The Doctor holds on to the TARDIS as the tremors grow in magnitude. "Get in," he tells Amanda. "Don't worry, we'll be back," he tells the scientists and leaves the TARDIS.

"Where are we going now?" Amanda asks.

"We appear to have traveled in time also. It happens. I slip. She slips."

"Before or after we saw the minotaur?"

"Before. I thought we were still in the same year of your graduation."

"But?"

"If what my memory of the human timeline is accurate, then we've traveled about sixty years into the future."

Amanda raised an eyebrow. "Humans set up stations on Europa in sixty years?"

"When you have a billionaire madman who wants to send humans to space, believe me, anything is possible."

He pulled the lever on the TARDIS and manually navigated it to a parking orbit around Europa, and looked through the door.

"It looks the same as ever," he said, confused. "It's not like something was inserted into Europa. Unless of course it was the main mass that pulled the other pieces together."

"Well, that'd be impossible," Amanda said. "We weren't close to the core, and as far as I know, Europa doesn't wobble."

"So that's out. What else?"

"It materialized into the ice? But I have a question."

"What's the question."

"Are the tunnels really natural, or were they made by the humans, or was it made by the minotaur when it materialized there?"

"It has to be the humans. If they're doing research on Europa, then they would have to have at least surveyed the tunnels if not dig it themselves."

"But they didn't know about the minotaur."

"That's right."

"So _our_ tunnel was natural?"

"...and not surveyed."

"Or... the minotaur appeared after the survey was complete."

The Doctor looked at her in absolute shock. "Why would a time traveling alien appear in a research settlement immediately after a survey was complete?"

"What if the survey was a litmus test to show how the level of sophistication of a civilization. I mean, a trans-planetary species must clearly be sophisticated enough, right?"

"Sophisticated enough for what?"

Amanda gulped. "To conquer."

The Doctor rushed away from the door to get the research team off the moon. This was bad. This was very, very bad.

But after the third step, the moon exploded and a trillion shards of ice from Europa darted towards the TARDIS.

The security field deflected most of them, but one shard/slab of ice made it through the door and Amanda and the Doctor barely moved away from it's path.

And in the distance, where Europa once existed, all they could see was the purple minotaur, now radiating with its ultra violet glow with increasing intensity.

"Doctor," Amanda tapped his shoulder when he was looking at the ice block that made it through the security field. "Look at the waist."

The Doctor looked closely at the minotaur's waist. The space around it could only be described as distorted. The Doctor ran to the console, dodging the ice block, and tried scanning the region around the minotaur.

"It's distorting space-time. It's the exact plane at which there's a hole."

"So if the top half of the alien is over here," Amanda asked, already realizing what the answer to her question is. "Then what's on the other side?"

"It's a battering ram. It's race - whichever one it is - scatters them all across the Universe and activates them once the closest civilization is sophisticated enough."

"What then?"

"It's going to lead the rest of them through."

"But how? You can't fit a ship through that small a hole--"

Her voice faltered when she saw the minotaur's waist glow brightly as the fault through the dark cosmos widened, until the cracks stretched enough to allow the rest of the minotaur's body came through, infinitely larger in comparison.

The crack grew wider and wider, seemingly larger than the moon that once existed there, and a large armada of battleships, spacetanks and fighters started flooding into the Jupiter orbit like locusts emerging from the Nile.

The crack was no longer planar. It had become more spherical. A wormhole.

The minotaur had opened a wormhole, and through it an entire battalion made its way through.

"What's going on Doctor?"

"War," the Doctor muttered. "Humanity's first intergalactic war."

* * *

_Spitsbergen, Svalbard -- Norway (present)_

Svalbard had a very unique emptiness to it. After UNIT took over the majority of the Spitsbergen, Longyearsben became quieter and emptier than usual.

But today, everyone who were underground erupted out of nowhere, assembling in large groups underneath temporary shelters placed overnight (although that meant very little during the polar nights), fully armed with part human part alien technology. In the distance from these large assemblies, there was a construction crew, building the base for humanity's secret weapon.

Out from the caves underneath, the Large Particle Beam generator [UN+2005], or The Capital P Boy as was commonly called. It had to be positioned accurately against the jagged mountains of Spitsbergen (hence the name) for the anticipated oncoming Judoon invasion.

The commander of the Spitsbergen base sat on an uncomfortable chair under the temporary shelters. His walkie-talkie crackled to life, "Come in Commander,"

"Yes, this is the Commander," he whispered into the walkie-talkie.

"We've received reports from Aberdeen International Airport. The Chief of Science was found dead in the 747."

The commander grimaced in silence. "How?"

"Cardiac arrest. Probably struck by a tazer."

"By whom?"

"The Judoon Troops that hijacked her plane. They'd already laid waste to the airport and UNIT troops from London got to Aberdeen before they spread to other cities, but," there was a pause, "we were too late to save her."

"But the Judoon have made base. And they have attacked. Do we have any prisoners?"

"One, but he wouldn't talk."

" _Make_ him talk."

The walkie-talkie turns off. The commander looks up, and sees a lieutenant approaching him. "Commander,"

"Yes?"

"The security protocols have been enacted. All international planes to the UK have been turned away. Immigration is under lockdown."

"Immigrants are the least of my concern, lieutenant. What about temporal anomalies?"

"We're on lookout. None so far."

"Has the base from Antarctica reported anything?"

"No gravitational anomalies either."

The walkie-talkie crackles once again.

"I'm talking about spatial anomalies."

"No reports from the South pole, commander."

"How are the regiments at the asteroid belt doing?"

"They managed to destroy the battleship from the Shadow Proclamation."

"I know that."

"No, there was a second one - this one made it to the asteroid belt directly."

"Don't tell me they nuked them."

"Nuked _Ganymede_ , the debris of which destroyed the battleship."

The walkie-talkie crackles, this time with more intensity seemingly.

"That'll be all," the commander said and turned to the walkie-talkie. "Yes?"

"We've found spies lurking around the London Eye. We've arrested them and interrogated them--"

"They haven't said anything?"

"Not them, but their transmitter just sent a message to the moon."

The commander almost gasped. "No."

"I'm afraid so."

The commander shut the walkie-talkie off and put his head down.

Either the headquarters for their spy operations are on the moon, or there's a satellite settlement on the moon that UNIT has not found yet.

The commander is silent for an inexplicable period of time. His gaze shifts from the bottom of his chair to the construction of The Capital P Boy.

It's necessary.

* * *

_4 Vesta, Asteroid Belt -- Present Day_

It took a couple of hours for the captain to realize what the darts of soot on the windows meant. He stood by the window, his fingers tracing the outline of the soot and looking up at the orange sky of the artificial atmosphere.

He looked nervously at the rest of barrack - thousands of soldiers not knowing what the heck was going on. He walked steadily to the control center and approached the meteorology station.

"One question," he said, placing one hand on the chief meteorologist. "This isn't just another meteor shower, is it?"

"What meteor shower?"

He pointed at the soot in the window - which to the meteorologist's defense looked like an extremely trivial amount of soot.

"I'll... check it out," he said, put on his headphones and started typing into his computer.

The captain walked further to the commander and whispered, "I think we've made a grave error."

"Before you say anything," the commander gestured. "We just got news from UNIT."

The captain raised an eyebrow.

"The situation is out of control. They've mobilized their secret weapon."

"The particle beam?"

"...how did you know about that?"

"Commander, everyone knows about that. UNIT isn't waterproof."

"In any case," he dismissed the borderline treasonous remark, "They've found that there have been military bases that have been compromised. As far as what I know, _our_ base isn't _compromised._ "

"Define compromised."

"Why?"

"Because I think some of the debris from the now destroyed Ganymede is spilling over to the asteroid belt."

"So?"

"We're not a gigantic ship with hyper-advanced technologies - unlike the one on Earth."

The commander looked to the same window and saw the rain of soot. "Compromised," he repeated. The dust from the debris, traveled at several hundred thousand meters a second, darting through the artificial atmosphere and struck the window.

The chief meteorologist stood up, and made eye-contact with the captain. His eyes do not look happy.

"What have you found?"

"It _is_ the debris from Ganymede. We're getting meteor reports from Ceres as well."

"So there's going to be a meteor shower? Stronger than the usual?"

The meteorologist adjusted his glasses, knowing not how to respond to this question in manner that wouldn't cause him to break down and bawl like a child. "80% chance of meteor shower. And the average diameter of the meteors are a lot higher than usual."

The captain's face grew pale. He struggled to find balance for a moment. A bright yellow warning sign displayed on the monitor. The meteorologist examined it quickly.

"Ceres has been struck by a shower of micro-particles."

The captain frowned, not understanding what this means.

"Their artificial atmosphere is gone. The entire base is in emergency mode."

He looked out the window, as the frequency of the soot-strikes increased at an alarming rate.

At one single piece of rock, no larger than a thumbnail, struck the window, creating a crack that looked like a spiderweb the size of a skyscraper.

"And we're next," the captain concluded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I purposefully left Clara behind in the descriptions of the companions for a very good reason - the Doctor still doesn't remember. This happens before any of the events in Season 10 (as the tag might have suggested) and therefore before he remembers Clara again.
> 
> Love to hear your comments :)


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